The Dallas Police Department asked the public on Sunday to submit "evidence of any wrongdoing" from the city's #BlackLivesMatter rallies through the iWatch Dallas application, where citizens can submit an image, evidence, or message information on suspected offenses. Instead, it ended up getting a massive influx of K-pop artists' photographs and videos.
And then, within hours, the DPD reported that the application had been down "because of technical problems."
Well, K-pop fans seem to have been back at it last night, uniting to fully back up the "Black Lives Matter" movement once more.
This week, mass demonstrations against police violence erupted across the United States, with significant protests taking place in Minneapolis, New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Dallas.
Often, the police exacerbated the peaceful demonstrations and aggressively struck out. Besides the streets, rallyists have also started to act online. In both the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store, hundreds of users sent one-star ratings to iWatch Dallas lists.
Several more individuals were using their feedback to tell the world "Black Lives Matter" and for George Floyd to demand justice.
It's difficult to ascertain whether Twitter's K-pop fans swamped the app with congestion, triggering it to stop functioning, or whether the police department desperately needed people to stop submitting images and videos through the app.
The Dallas Police did not answer promptly to a request for comment. The virtual protest began when thousands of times a twitter post from the person on twitter @7soulsmap, showing a screen capture of the initial Dallas PD tweet, was retweeted.
A couple of hours later, @7soulsmap answered with a clip to their own tweet, saying, "If you're all posting this one on their application, I'll give you a $1, I promise."
"DOWNLOAD THE APP AND SEND ALL YOUR FANCAMS!!!" tweet @ngelwy stated in @7soulsmap's presently-deleted statement. "SEND THEM ALL!!! Start making THEIR Current job AS Tough AS POSSIBLE!!! GET THEM Flustered!!!
Hundreds of people replied to the @7soulsmap tweet, and many people posted screen recordings, posting K-pop clips to the iWatch Dallas application.
Person @ngelwy apologized profusely for enabling people to use the software and urged people to uninstall it, adding that before sending a message, the app checks for the user's location.
If a user is trying to complete a tip without sharing their coordinates, an error message will be displayed in the app that stated: "person is not registered."
@7soulsmap, who wished to remain anonymous, told BuzzFeed News they're pleased with how people reacted to their Twitter post.
Two racially insensitive campaigns, #WhiteOutWednesday and #WhiteLivesMatter, apparently started to surge overnight on Twitter after #BlackOutTuesday, triggering K-pop supporters to respond rapidly once again.
Co-opting the keywords and phrases, the supporters were flooding them with anti-discrimination and anti-racist tweets and K-pop fancam video content, essentially suppressing white supremacist posts.
And people were pleased to see that the campaigns in several cases did not contribute to racist remarks, but to expressions of encouraging words from the K-pop fandoms.
Opting one to tweet, "#WhiteLivesMatter LMAO I WAS Fully prepared TO Personally attack THE S**T Out Of Everything, THE K-POP Superfans ARE Ruining THE # DAMN NEVER THAT Absolutely thrilled Have seen K-POP FANCAM"
According to an article that was published early this morning, "The posts totally buried virtually all real racial remarks using the Twitter campaign for a span of time, at least."
